2 weeks Ago By Evening Standard
Activist has admitted contempt of for flouting a order by making repeated false allegations against a teenage Syrian refugee. The far-right activist, 41, lost a High Court battle in 2021 after he made libellous allegations against a Syrian refugee, Jamal Hijazi, calling the 15-year-old violent and a “bully”. In the wake of the court defeat, Mr Justice Nicklin made an order banning Robinson - real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon - from repeating the allegations.
But heard he has committed a series of breaches in 2023 and 2024. On Monday, he admitted two Contempt of Court charges covering that series of breaches of the High Court injunction. These include airing the film ‘Silenced’ at a protest in Trafalgar Square in July, livestreaming a video in Denmark which was subsequently posted on YouTube, and a series of online interviews including with Jordan Peterson.
Yaxley-Lennon has been in custody since Friday, after he handed himself in to police in Folkestone. He has been separately charged with failing to provide his mobile phone access code to police under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, and was technically set free on bail until a court for that criminal charge next month. But he was held in custody over the weekend, ahead of the Contempt hearing in .
On Saturday, thousands of his supporters gathered in central London for a protest which the political activist missed after he was remanded. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Two tier Keir fuelled the riots” and chanted “We want Tommy out” as they headed from Victoria station to Parliament Square. Robinson was first questioned over the terror allegation in July, after which he was set free and subsequently left the country.
Mr Justice Johnson issued a warrant for Yaxley-Lennon’s arrest but ordered that it not be carried out “until early October” to allow him time to indicate that he would attend the next hearing voluntarily or to apply to “set aside” the warrant. An application to set aside the warrant was then made last week, but was rejected, paving the way for his arrest and remand. Yaxley-Lennon posted a video of himself arriving at Luton Airport on October 20 and said he was surprised at that stage that he had not been arrested.
The court heard the activist has been found in Contempt of Court three times previously, in 2017 at Canterbury crown court for filming within the precincts of the court, in Leeds in 2019 for interviewing defendants as they arrived for their trial and breaching a court order, and in 2022 for failing to attend a High Court hearing. He paid a £900 fine for the third offence, and was jailed for nine months for the first two incidents. Yaxley-Lennon indicated from the dock that he accepted the latest Contempt charges, which centre on his ‘Silenced’ film and are set out in interviews he conducted between January 2023 and this summer.
The court heard publication of his film had been disseminated by others online, including by Andrew Tate, to millions of potential listeners. Aidan Eardley KC, for the Solicitor General, said the initial breaches of the order were smaller in scale, but Robinson then recorded a new introduction and started openly broadcasting the film to large crowds. Referring to “continuing concerning behaviour by Mr Yaxley-Lennon”, Mr Eardley said when the second Contempt charge was filed when the Silenced film on X had been viewed 44m times.
“Because of the nature of the film is to effectively re-run the case that failed at trial, it substantially repeats all the allegations made at trial”, he said. He claimed that all of the paragraphs of the injunction were breached “at one point or another” by the film. He said in written submissions that the court “can be sure that the defendant was responsible for the publication of the film” and “also intended that it should be shared as widely as possible via other channels”.
Sasha Wass KC, for Robinson, said he gained a “reputation for being someone prepared to take up unpopular causes”, and he made the film investigating the Syrian schoolboy with the financial backing of US broadcaster Alex Jones. The hearing continues..
